We also wanted to take a moment and talk more about yesterday's changes. This is not a full redesign â" far from it. We got rid of the left-hand nav bar because it just wasn't getting used very much. One of the biggest pieces of feedback from the Beta test was that the community didn't want us to waste screen real estate. The left-hand nav bar wasted a lot, particularly on smaller browser widths. Aside from gaining more space on the page, all the comments and stories are the same as before. The most noticeable change was to the header. We didn't want to take away navigation functionality altogether, so we put it there, and made the header look and scale a bit better. We're not done working on it, and we're cleaning up the places in which it breaks.
I think one of the biggest fallacies that developers make is forgetting that vertical real estate is far more precious than horizontal real estate. Even now on a 27" screen, I've got two inches of vertical real estate eaten up by browser menus, tabs, and headers. I've got perhaps ten inches of horizontal real estate that serves no purpose other than to brighten my room. Needless to say, I'm not a huge fan of the changes, but I understand you have a larger market to serve. I am obviously not part of that market, and that's why these changes make me sad - this website used to provide me relevant information in my field that I used on a regular basis. Now it just lets me know that I am not relevant, and that slashdot isn't capable of providing useful news. You're a Crossfire or The View, when you used to be the Daily Show.
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